France's Fifth Republic, which operates as a permanent coup d'état, will end up by devouring politics itself. Its principles, its values, its procedures, its rules, its parties, its institutions, its customs, its manners, its overarching common purpose, all those elements that maintained a semblance of democratic culture shared by the majority of parties and citizens. Here it is, dying before our very eyes, taken hostage by a maniac who is destroying all its symbols and trampling over all its points of reference.
Like a fanatical Roman emperor, dragging his empire to ruin and sacrificing his people, François Fillon, the presidential candidate chosen by the Right in its primary election, is setting fire to everything which he is supposed to protect if he were to be elected President of the Republic and thus custodian of the French Constitution. By vilifying the justice system (“government by judges” he calls it), the media (he says he is the victim of a “political assassination”) and his own elected representatives (“I'll do without them”), he has turned his back on all legitimacy other than that of the absolute power and complete impunity that victory in the election would grant him.
No more separation of powers, no more impartial justice system, no more independent press, no more collective debate, just personal power. And, moreover, a power won thanks to help from the street, for in his plunge into the abyss François Fillon has called for a potentially divisive demonstration in Paris this Sunday, as he has criticised the very functioning of democracy itself – the work of the justice system, press investigations and the honouring of commitments.
The man who, in the past, has issued moralistic messages about political ethics, a Gaullist brandishing the rigid integrity of General De Gaulle in the face of opponents, the candidate who swore that the dishonour of being placed under formal investigation for an alleged crime would inevitably make him withdraw, has suddenly revealed the soul of a backroom plotter doing a deal with the most obscure and backward-looking forces, to the point where his supporters include elements from the extreme nationalist right who are on a crusade against what they see as the “cosmopolitan oligarchy”.
Fillon has adopted a kind of siege-like mentality and the entire affair is verging on one of those lurid human interest stories whose sudden appearance reveals the everyday nature of society's dysfunctioning. This affair has disturbed yet further an election campaign where nothing is going as planned - because in a confused but unanimous way the people no longer want things to go on as before – and has laid bear the fundamentally irresponsible nature of the Fifth Republic, which was established in 1958. It is an anomalous regime, with no equivalent in other democracies, that reduces the sovereignty of all to the power of a single person, and democratic complexity to authoritarian simplicity, and is it now reaching the climax of its destructive wrongdoing.
Far from creating a strong state, this regime has continually weakened the French Republic as a common refuge, and has instead protected the minority who have taken ownership of it, those indispensable and interchangeable professionals of a politics that has lacked all virtue. For what is the Fillon affair, with its allegations of 'fake jobs' and clientelism, if not the public revelation of the corruption of Parliamentary life itself, shielded by the opaque system of the Fifth Republic? This archaic presidentialism, this reincarnation of French Bonapartism, has - from the inside - destroyed politics itself as a collective process, a process which assumes debate and subjection to procedures, an obligation to be answerable to electors and accountable to the party faithful.
This old regime, which was drawn up by De Gaulle against the previous “regime of the parties”, has devoured political parties down to the last bone, as has been demonstrated to an absurd extent by this unreal and unlikely campaign which is more about a battle of egos than of ideas. The centrist independent candidate Emmanuel Macron and the left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon have rid themselves of all conventional partisan party political procedures and are instead speaking directly to the faithful, owing nothing to anyone but themselves and barely tolerating questioning from the press. François Fillon no longer seems to belong to the right-wing Les Républicains party whose primary election he won, with its leadership powerless in the face of his crazy downward spiral. As for the official Socialist Party candidate, former education minister Benoît Hamon, he is in a precarious position in relation to his own party which is run by his socialist opponents. Then there is Marine Le Pen whose far-right Front National, far from being a democratic party, is a family clan.
The Fifth Republic has managed to suck out all of our democratic lifeblood. This wasteland can be a breeding ground for catastrophe in the form of abstentionism (and also people who do not register to vote in the first place) as many turn away demoralised from the voting booth, a phenomenon that has continued to grow in recent times and which affects all sections of society. If one looks at just Parliamentary elections, between 1990 and 2014 France had the highest average level of abstention in the European Union with a rate of 40%, far ahead of the median group of countries, Holland, Spain and Germany. France is the only country where the growth in the number of abstentions follows a straight line, going from 32.5% in the second round vote in 1993 to 44.7% in the 2012 Parliamentary elections. With all his powers, the president and the presidential Parliamentary majority represent only a minority of the electorate.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
This is not to deify the act of voting or idealise political parties, which cannot fully encapsulate the permanently incomplete nature of democracy and the need for it to be inventive. But one should not allow this caution to conceal the evidence: our Republic is today in its death throes, leaving the way open for the enemies of its ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity. Unless there is a sudden democratic wake up call, unless there is an awareness that something fundamental is now at stake, and unless there is a real desire out of this to create a popular union for a new Republic based on social and democratic demands, then the path will be clear for an authoritarian, non-egalitarian and nationalist takeover.
At a time when Donald Trump's presidency in the United States reminds us that democracies are fragile things, that they are always at risk from backward thinking, from destructive forces from within, from people going back on their word and from corruption, it is useful to remind ourselves of a report from an American foundation – the Peterson Institute – which in 2014 highlighted how the real French obstacle was neither economic nor social but democratic. It writes of the “straitjacket of the presidency” which “prevents France from establishing a stable grand parliamentary coalition of the kind that governs most other European countries today”. It is this suffocation of partisan diversity and political pluralism that plays into the hands of the extreme right.
This call for reform in France from across the Atlantic, which went largely unnoticed here apart from by Mediapart, proposes that three articles of the Constitution should be abolished, in order to reduce the president's omnipotence. These are articles 8, 12, and 15 which currently give the president the right to nominate the prime minister, call new Parliamentary elections and serve as commander-in-chief. Of course there are more ambitious and groundbreaking plans, particularly in the manifestos of the three presidential candidates of the Left (Hamon, Mélenchon and green Yannick Jadot who all agree on a republican reconstruction of the Constitution, a first in France) and in the proposals coming from many citizen networks and associations. But the essential thing, and it is the fundamentals that are at stake here, is that all these dynamics should come together rather than going their separate ways and competing with one another, at the risk of becoming weakened, of divisions, of resentment and despair, and ultimately of being defeated.
The Constitution of the Year I of the French Republic is, without doubt, the most radically democratic of constitutions in its inspiration. Pronounced in 1793, it barely had time to live but in its preamble it has left us with a second Declaration of the Rights of Man containing many bold elements. They include this (article 31): “Offences by the agents of the people and of their agents must never go unpunished. No man has the right to lay claim to greater inviolability than other citizens.” And also this (article 28): “A people always has the right to review, reform and change its Constitution. One generation may not subject future generations to its laws.”
In 2018 the Fifth Republic will be sixty years old, and in May of next year the events of 1968, when young people and workers from across the whole country came together around the common causes of freedom and equality and cried “Ten years – that's enough!” in reference to the return of De Gaulle to power, will celebrate their fiftieth anniversary.
It is high time we updated the calendar and upset the timetable. Before it is too late.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter